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AMERICAN  PAINTERS  OF 
YESTERDAY  AND  TODAY 


BY 

FREDERIC  FAIRCHILD  SHERMAN 


NEW  YORK 

PRIVATELY  PRINTED 

MCMXIX 


•• .     )    • 


Copyright,  1919,  by 
Frederic  Fairchild  Sherman 


Libra; 


TO    MY    FRIEND 
DOROTHEA    A.     DREIER 


CQ 
H 
•J 


459278 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Miniature  Landscapes  by  J.  Francis  Murphy  ...  3 

The  Landscape  of  Dwight  W.  Tryon 13 

Four  Figure  Pictures  by  George  Fuller 21 

Early  Oil  Paintings  by  Winslow  Homer 29 

Figure  Pictures  by  Wyatt  Eaton     39 

Arthur  B.  Davies 47 

Early  Genre  Pictures  by  Harry  W.  Watrous     .   .  55 

Benjamin  West 63 


Vll 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

J.  FRANCIS  MURPHY 

The  River  Farm Frontispiece 

PAGE 

Twilight 6 

Late  September 6 

Golden  Autumn 8 

DWIGHT  W.  TRYON 

Glastonbury  Meadows 14 

Cernay  La  Ville 14 

Early  Morning,  September 16 

Twilight,  November 18 

GEORGE  FULLER 

The  Romany  Girl 22 

Winifred  Dysart 22 

The  Quadroon 22 

Psyche 22 

WINSLOW  HOMER 

Haymaking 29 

The  Song  of  the  Lark 30 

A  French  Farm  30 

Prout's  Neck 34 

ix 


WYATT  EATON 

Portrait  of  William  Cullen  Bryant 40 

Ariadne 4^ 

Lassitude     4* 

Reverie 4* 

ARTHUR  B.  DAVIES 

Girl  at  the  Fountain 50 

The  Violin  Girl       50 

Clothed  in  Dominion S^ 

HARRY  W.  WATROUS 

L'Addition 56 

The  Guitar  Player     5^ 

Records S^ 

Lost S^ 

BENJAMIN  WEST 

Portrait  of  John  Sedley 64 

Portrait  of  a  Gentleman     66 

The    Envoys    Returning    from    the    Promised 

Land 68 

Presentation  of  the  Queen  of  Sheba  at  the 

Court  of  King  Solomon 68 


MINIATURE  LANDSCAPES 
BY  J.  FRANCIS  MURPHY 


AMERICAN  PAINTERS  OF 
YESTERDAY  AND  TODAY 


MINIATURE  LANDSCAPES 
BY  J.  FRANCIS  MURPHY 

ERE  size  of  itself  has  little  or  nothing 
to  do  with  the  greatness  of  any  work 
of  art,  and  yet  many  amateurs  of 
today,  especially  in  this  country, 
persist  in  thinking  and  speaking  only 
of  large  paintings  as  important  pic- 
tures. Small  as  well  as  large  paintings  are  some- 
times important,  and  whoever  habitually  overlooks 
them  necessarily  misses  a  considerable  measure  of 
what  is  best  in  pictorial  art. 

Among  our  native  landscape  painters  J.  Francis 
Murphy  has  to  his  credit  a  sufficient  number  of  land- 
scapes in  miniature  of  various  periods  to  constitute 
a  little  gallery  as  representative  as  any  that  could  be 
formed  by  gathering  together  a  similar  number  of 
his  large  canvases.  Quality,  which  is  a  very  attrac- 
tive element  in  his  big  pictures,  his  smaller  works 
possess  in  a  superlative  degree.  The  natural  inti- 
macy of  their  appeal,  however,  is  in  no  sense  encom- 

3 


passed  at  the  expense  of  any  sacrifice  of  spatial  design 
or  atmospheric  envelopment  which  have  so  much  to 
do  with  the  authority  as  well  as  the  beauty  of  his 
interpretation  of  nature.  The  best  of  his  large  pic- 
tures have  their  counterparts  in  miniature  —  little 
canvases  that  are  just  as  truly  and  unmistakably 
masterpieces  of  landscape  painting.  One  may  study 
in  them  the  characteristic  technic  of  the  artist,  his 
sensitive  subordination  of  insistent  though  inhar- 
monious passages  of  color,  and  his  discrimination  and 
discretion  in  deliberately  emphasizing  the  larger  and 
finer  aspects  of  linear  design  and  chiaroscuro.  In 
other  words  the  best  of  these  little  landscapes  are  in 
every  way  as  truly  great  pictures  as  the  best  of  his 
large  canvases. 

Murphy  is,  I  think,  as  Blakelock  was,  always  at 
his  best  in  his  smallest  and  his  largest  pictures.  The 
intermediate  sizes  seem  not  to  afford  area  enough 
for  his  biggest  efforts  and  yet  to  be  too  large  to  per- 
mit of  his  achieving  in  them  that  intimate  touch 
which  so  sensibly  enhances  the  charm  of  the  smaller 
sizes.  His  little  landscapes  are  more  definitely  repre- 
sentative and  more  truly  expressive  of  nature  herself, 
while  his  large  landscapes  oftener  than  not  impress 
one  as  embodying  rather  his  own  feeling  as  he  reacts 
to  whatever  mood  it  is  he  has  chosen  to  interpret. 

It  is  a  curious  characteristic  of  his  art  that  while 
in  his  miniature  canvases  we  often  find  various  sub- 


sidiary  elements  of  interest  such  as  buildings,  boats, 
figures  and  the  like,  the  larger  pictures  seldom  if 
ever  present  any  variety  of  interest  whatever,  the 
whole  canvas  being  deliberately  devoted  to  the  ade- 
quate expression  of  a  single  emotion,  however  elu- 
sive, and  with  no  more  of  a  foundation  in  the  facts 
of  nature  than  will  suffice  to  frame  the  transitory 
loveliness  of  a  moment.  As  a  consequence  of  this 
method  some  of  the  large  pictures  seem  relatively 
empty  and  sometimes,  I  think,  rather  uninteresting 
when  the  aerial  envelope  is  insufficient  of  itself  to 
clothe  them  in  a  beauty  of  its  own  or  his  effort  to 
secure  unusual  quality  is  unsuccessful.  The  delicate 
gradation  of  values  that  counts  for  so  much  in  his 
small  canvases,  if  it  fails  to  interpret  his  mood,  be- 
comes monotonous  in  the  larger  pictures.  On  the 
other  hand  all  the  evanescent  loveliness  of  atmos- 
phere is  just  as  truly  a  part  of  his  small  as  of  his  large 
paintings,  only  in  them  it  is  seemingly  more  a  part 
of  the  scene  itself  and  less  an  expression  of  the  mood 
in  which  he  worked. 

I  do  not  wish  to  convey  the  impression  of  being 
insensible  to  the  merits  of  the  large  canvases  — they 
are  too  obvious  to  permit  of  their  being  overlooked  by 
anyone  who  is  at  all  sensitive  to  what  is  most  truly 
beautiful  in  contemporary  American  landscape  art. 
In  suggesting  minor  faults  which  one  finds  in  some, 
I  do  not  mean  to  imply  that  they  are  common  even 

5 


in  the  large  canvases  or  that  the  smaller  pictures 
which  I  have  chosen  to  write  about  here  are  faultless. 
However,  any  inaccuracy  in  interpretation  in  a  land- 
scape of  considerable  dimensions  is,  simply  because  it 
involves  so  much  in  the  way  of  mere  representation, 
seemingly  exaggerated,  while  a  similar  defect  in  a 
small  painting  is  less  likely  to  be  discovered  except 
as  one  studies  it  closely.  I  am  not  sure  either  that 
it  is  not  true  that  in  working  a  painter  senses  an 
inaccurate  rendering  in  a  small  picture  more  often 
than  in  a  large  canvas,  in  the  elaboration  of  which 
he  is  absorbed  by  subtleties  of  mood  and  emotion 
rather  than  by  problems  of  actual  representation. 
Thus  Murphy's  miniature  landscapes  have,  I  believe, 
a  more  definite  aspect  of  reality  while  his  larger  pic- 
tures appeal  to  us  more  particularly  because  of  their 
successful  embodiment  of  spiritual  values. 

In  the  eighties  and  the  nineties  Murphy  produced 
some  of  his  finest  works.  As  early  as  1897  his  inter- 
pretation shows  a  tendency  toward  that  sensitive 
re-creation  of  delicate  atmospheric  harmonies  which 
constitutes  the  great  charm  of  his  present  work. 
The  earlier  pictures  and  especially  the  smaller  of 
them  are  appreciably  more  realistic.  They  convey 
more  of  an  idea  of  the  actual  beauty  of  nature  un- 
altered by  hazes,  mistiness  and  half-lights.  His  pres- 
ent intention  seems  rather  to  embody  in  just  these 
unsubstantial   elements   a   sufficient   emotional   in- 

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terest  in  the  way  of  an  expression  of  mood  to  satisfy 
one,  regardless  of  the  consequent  lack  of  definition 
in  the  more  elementary  and  substantial  beauties  of 
the  earth.  Inasmuch,  however,  as  the  mood  in 
any  given  canvas  is  personal,  it  mvolves  the  in- 
tegrity of  the  whole  composition  as  an  interpreta- 
tion of  nature,  and  leaves  one  eventually  dissat- 
isfied though  perhaps  unaware  why.  Only  when 
he  successfully  interprets  nature's  moods  are  his 
later  landscapes  really  great,  because  unmistakably 
true.  The  importance  of  these  works  is  the  greater 
because  of  the  difficulty  of  the  problem  of  producing 
in  a  convincing  counterfeit  of  unsubstantial  aerial 
envelope  a  reaction  to  an  exquisite  mood.  Com- 
pared to  the  representation  of  the  definite  and  ob- 
vious beauty  of  any  scene  from  nature  such  a  canvas 
is  a  real  revelation  of  the  possibilities  of  oil  painting, 
and  we  therefore  rightly  estimate  the  best  of  them 
as  the  greatest  of  Murphy's  paintings. 

His  earlier  works  are,  however,  more  consistently 
satisfying  because  more  generally  successful.  And 
their  success  is,  I  think,  largely  a  matter  of  their 
being  concerned  chiefly  with  rendering  the  concrete 
rather  than  the  abstract  beauties  of  nature  —  the 
simple  loveliness  of  certain  scenes  rather  than  those 
subtle  atmospheric  conditions  in  which  the  moods 
of  nature  are  more  sensibly  felt,  but  which  are  in- 
finitely more  difficult  to  insinuate  into  an  oil  paint- 

7 


ing.  Indeed,  considering  his  present  problem,  I  do 
not  so  much  wonder  that  some  of  his  pictures  fail 
to  fully  realize  his  intention  as  that  such  a  number 
come  so  nearly  to  being  entirely  satisfactory  in  their 
embodiment  of  the  spirit  rather  than  the  form  of 
nature. 

The  River  Farm,  six  by  twelve  inches,  reproduced 
as  the  frontispiece  to  this  volume,  and  the  Twilight 
of  approximately  the  same  size,  dated  1884,  are 
.exquisite  examples  of  the  early  period.  The  Late 
September  of  1897  and  the  Golden  Autumn  of  1908, 
also  very  small  canvases,  show  satisfactorily  Mur- 
phy's development  in  the  direction  I  have  mentioned. 
The  River  Farm,  with  its  houses  and  barns,  hay- 
mow and  boat  at  the  water's  edge,  soft  green  meadow 
and  distant  fields,  is  a  well-nigh  perfect  poem  of 
country  life.  The  cool  blue  of  the  sky  where  it 
shows  through  the  soft  white  clouds  is  beautifully 
reflected  in  the  placid  waters  of  the  river,  together 
with  all  the  charming  detail  of  the  foreground,  and 
helps  to  make  it  a  singularly  attractive  picture. 
The  Twilight  is  a  similar  composition,  the  chief 
interest,  however,  being  a  fine  rendering  of  the 
glamour  of  the  afterglow.  It  is  a  sensitive  inter- 
pretation, full  of  that  subtlety  of  refinement  which 
is  so  much  a  part  of  the  artist's  great  gift  as  a  land- 
scape painter.  These  few  works  are  sufficient,  I 
think,  to  enable  one  to  visualize  his  artistic  devel- 

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opment  and  at  the  same  time  they  illustrate  ad- 
mirably the  ideas  of  Murphy's  art  I  have  expressed 
in  this  essay. 

I  believe  that  if  we  stop  to  consider  in  what 
direction  the  development  of  landscape  painting  is 
now  progressing  it  will  be  only  to  recognize  it  imme- 
diately in  the  way  of  increased  attention  given  to 
atmospheric  envelopment  in  which  the  painters  of 
today  are  finding  and  giving  to  us  a  new  revelation 
of  beauty.  It  is  Murphy's  distinction  to  be  one  of 
the  first  as  well  as  one  of  the  best  of  our  American 
exponents  of  this  new  type  of  landscape  art. 


THE  LANDSCAPE  OF 
DWIGHT  W.  TRYON 


THE  LANDSCAPE  OF 
DWIGHT  W.  TRYON 

MERICAN  LANDSCAPE  of  today 
is  remarkable  rather  for  fineness  than 
for  largeness  of  vision,  for  quality 
rather  than  for  strength.  A  result 
of  more  careful  study  of  the  technic 
of  pictorial  art,  it  manifests  it- 
self in  a  facility  unknown  to  the  craftsmen  of  the 
Hudson  River  school,  and  in  a  tendency  toward 
specialization  in  choice  of  subject  which,  with  the 
possible  exception  of  Wyant,  was  as  foreign  to  practi- 
tioners of  the  period  immediately  following  as  it 
was  to  them.  There  ensues  a  measurable  diminu- 
tion of  virility,  together  with  an  appreciable  increase 
in  subtlety  of  expression.  The  painter  of  today  is 
more  proficient  than  his  predecessor  and  therefore 
his  landscape  is  more  precious  and  more  precise  in 
its  interpretation  of  particular  phases  of  nature.  He 
lacks,  however,  the  understanding  that  enabled  a 
man  like  Inness,  for  instance,  to  visualize  not  alone 
one  or  two  but  many  of  her  moods.  It  is  a  natural 
consequence  of  a  more  perfect  technical  training,  the 
earlier  artist,  self-taught,  inventing  an  imperfect 
method  to  express  the  big  thing  that  powerfully 

13 


moved  him;  the  later,  equipped  with  a  superior 
style,  intrigued  by  the  elusiveness  of  certain  lovely 
effects  which  he  never  tires  of  trying  to  transfer  to 
his  canvas.  In  the  first  instance  the  painter  tries 
for  a  technic  worthy  of  his  subject,  in  the  second 
for  a  subject  worthy  of  his  technic. 

The  development  of  American  landscape  has  been 
singularly  steady  and  consistent.  That  of  Inness, 
Wyant,  and  Martin  is  obviously  founded  upon  that 
of  Bierstadt,  Durand,  and  Kensett,  and  that  of 
Tryon  and  Murphy  is  no  less  plainly  the  outcome 
of  theirs.  It  has  been  a  case  at  each  step  forward 
of  the  younger  artist  taking  up  the  formula  of  his 
immediate  predecessor,  refining  upon  it  and  adapt- 
ing it  more  perfectly  to  the  emotional  significance 
of  the  subject.  Bierstadt  is  grandiose,  but  undis- 
turbed by  the  human  element  that  obstructs  the 
grandeur  of  Cole;  Martin  and  Inness  discard  the 
panoramic  and  the  photographic,  and  in  their  life- 
time our  landscape  first  becomes  truly  significant 
in  that  it  embodies  feeling  as  well  as  representation. 
With  Tryon  it  assumes  a  new  intimacy  through  a 
harmonious  emphasis  of  certain  subtleties. 

Tryon's  landscape,  besides  being  intimate,  which 
it  might  be  without  necessarily  being  in  any  sense 
significant,  is  very  poetic.  Its  poetry  is  that  of  an 
acknowledged  precision,  but  it  is  no  less  authentic 
on  that  account  and  patently  more  perfect.    The 

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poetry  of  earth  is  evident  in  his  pictures,  but  not  any 
great  portion  of  it,  just  a  small  measure  of  the  minor 
poetry  —  a  thin  strain  but  no  less  sweet,  whether  it 
throb  with  the  ecstasy  of  the  spring,  sparkle  with  the 
starlight  of  a  summer*s  night,  or  shimmer  with  the 
silvery  mists  of  morn.  His  eye  is  trained  to  en- 
visioning the  most  transitory  and  the  most  elusive 
of  atmospheric  phenomena  and  this  enables  him  to 
simulate  them  in  the  ethereal  envelopment  that 
serves  a  distinct  purpose  in  accentuating  the  poignancy 
of  his  point  of  view.  ^  With  a  few  pictorial  motifs  he 
has  contrived  the  evolution  of  an  exquisite  and  al- 
luring type  of  landscape,  as  accurate  in  its  essential 
truth  to  nature  as  it  is  individual  in  its  variation 
from  other  familiar  types.  If  he  is  conscious  of  the 
limitations  of  a  sort  of  fixed  compositional  form, 
which  is  characteristic,  it  is  evident  that  he  finds 
room  therein  for  expressing  very  adequately  whatever 
he  has  to  say.  This  may  be  because  he  is  contented 
never  to  try  to  say  too  much.  His  pictures  are 
poetic  but  lyric,  not  epic  in  their  intention. 

His  landscape  has  a  firm  foundation,  for  it  is  based 
upon  a  real  knowledge  of  the  topography  of  a  section 
of  the  country  with  which  he  has  been  in  close  con- 
tact almost  continuously.  It  is  a  real,  not  an 
imaginary  landscape,  though  it  may  often  seem 
unreal  in  its  unaccustomed  beauty,  as  his  effects  ap- 
proximate the  unearthly  splendor  of  those  rare  and 

15 


exquisite  moments  he  pictures.  Singularly  simple 
in  its  graphic  portrayal  of  actual  appearances,  it  is 
variously  expressive  of  a  considerable  range  of  feeling 
which  finds  embodiment  in  the  sensitive  record  of 
definite  atmospheric  conditions.  As  the  weather 
aflPects  us  in  real  life,  so  it  does  in  his  art,  where  the 
mood  of  nature  is  the  most  important  factor  and 
informs  the  landscape  with  real  meaning.  In  other 
words,  it  is  the  immaterial  rather  than  the  material 
evidence  of  nature  that  interests  us  in  his  landscape, 
just  as  in  human  nature  it  is  character  rather  than 
personal  appearance  that  interests  us. 

There  is  an  earlier  phase  of  Tryon's  work  in  which 
there  is  more  of  the  fact  and  less  of  the  significance 
of  nature.  It  ends  practically  as  soon  as  he  has 
mastered  his  forms  and  settled  upon  his  composi- 
tion. After  that  he  is  busy  with  light  and  shadow, 
values  and  quality,  in  which  he  finds  a  more  efficient 
means  for  the  expression  of  the  emotional  content  of 
his  theme.  In  the  sense,  however,  that  these  earlier 
works  are  a  more  literal  transcript  of  familiar  rather 
than  unfamiliar  aspects  of  nature,  more  direct  in 
their  construction  and  less  calculated  in  their  elabo- 
ration, they  correspond  more  closely  to  historic  stand- 
ards and  satisfy  more  generally  that  large  portion 
of  the  public  which  remains  conservative  in  its  ap- 
praisal of  artistic  merit.  As  few  of  us  have  yet  out- 
grown  entirely  conservative   tendencies,   it   follows 

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that  practically  all  find  in  them  much  to  admire. 
Only  our  recent  and  enthusiastic  interest  in,  and 
knowledge  of,  the  newer  and  finer  developments  of 
landscape  painting  enables  us  to  appreciate  the  sub- 
tleties of  his  later  work  and  to  see  in  it  a  more  notable 
achievement. 

Several  of  the  early  pictures  are  of  foreign  sub- 
jects, the  results  of  his  student  days  in  France.  They 
are  naturally  not  so  convincing  as  the  New  England 
canvases  in  their  characterization  of  locality.  I 
have  selected  the  Glastonbury  Meadows  of  i88i 
and  the  Cernay  La  Ville  of  the  same  year  to  illustrate 
the  early  phase  of  his  art.  The  former  is  as  literal  in 
the  exactitude  with  which  it  reproduces  the  topo- 
graphical features  of  the  country  as  it  is  lovely  in  its 
rendering  of  the  pleasant  quiet  of  a  sunny  summer's 
day.  The  scene  is  singularly  satisfying  in  its  fa- 
miliarity and  the  fine  simplicity  of  the  composition 
emphasizes  its  peculiar  charm.  It  is  a  masterpiece 
of  what  I  should  term  the  better  sort  of  realism. 
The  other  picture  is  one  of  the  finer  of  his  French 
landscapes,  full  of  an  admirable  sincerity.  It  has 
about  it  the  air  of  an  actual  scene  translated  by  the 
touch  of  art  into  a  vision  of  measurable  beauty. 

The  Early  Morning  —  September  of  1904  and  the 
Twilight  —  November  of  191 2  show  the  develop- 
ment of  his  art  and  are  representative  examples  of 
the  later  period.    In  them  one  discerns  an  individual 

17 


type  of  landscape  and  the  evidences  of  a  rare  technic 
which  he  has  all  but  perfected.  It  is,  of  course,  not 
new,  but  it  is  very  personal,  and  it  helps  him  to 
re-create  in  delicate  gradations  of  light  and  of  shadow 
subtle  atmospheric  effects  that  are  the  visible  signs 
of  the  moods  of  nature  just  as  smiles  and  tears  are 
the  visible  signs  of  human  emotion.  However 
lovely  the  face  of  nature,  it  is  always  her  feelings  that 
he  is  interested  in  interpreting,  one  might  say,  and  it 
is  this  characteristic  of  his  landscape  that  makes  it 
interesting  to  us.  One  may  estimate  quite  accu- 
rately the  worth  of  any  of  his  later  works  by  the 
measure  of  one's  realization  of  its  emotional  sig- 
nificance. 

The  objective  world,  its  primitive  and  elemental 
grandeur,  the  naked  truth  of  nature,  as  we  see  it  in 
the  works  of  other  artists,  concerns  him  not  at  all. 
His  art  is  subjective  and  his  interest  is  in  the  spiritual 
significance  of  the  visible  world  as  it  is  made  in- 
telligible in  immaterial  beauty.  Whatever  the  ma- 
terial basis  of  his  landscape,  however  true  it  may  be 
in  its  portrayal  of  any  actual  area  of  the  earth,  the 
interest  that  absorbs  the  spectator's  attention  in  it  is 
almost  invariably  centred  in  the  sky.  His  pic- 
tures are  not  so  much  remarkable  as  representations 
of  the  world  in  which  we  live  as  they  are  illuminating 
as  expressions  of  something  of  the  infinity  of  beauty 
that  like  a  halo  surrounds  the  earth. 

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FOUR  FIGURE  PICTURES 
BY  GEORGE  FULLER 


FOUR  FIGURE  PICTURES 
BY  GEORGE   FULLER 


N  1843  George  Fuller  wrote  from  his 
Deerfield  farm  to  Henry  Kirke  Brown, 
then  in  Italy,  "I  have  concluded  to 
see  nature  for  myself,  through  the 
eye  of  no  one  else.'*  It  may  have 
been  a  decision  forced  upon  him  by 
circumstances  that  denied  familiarity  with  the  visions 
of  other  painters,  but  it  was  no  less  a  wise  one  and  re- 
sulted eventually  in  his  creating  a  kind  of  picture 
distinctively  different  from  those  with  which  the 
public  was  already  acquainted. 

He  may  have  underestimated  the  value  of  technic, 
for  certainly  time  has  made  havoc  with  much  that 
he  did,  but  even  when  he  wrote  from  Italy  (whithei 
he  went  in  i86o  to  study  the  old  masters)  that  it 
pleased  him  "to  see  how  the  old  fellows  went  at 
their  subject  to  tell  their  story,  and  how  scumbling, 
light  and  dark  shadows,  took  care  of  themselves," 
he  added,  "Yes,  and  drawing,  too,  not  that  these 
things  are  less  important,  but  that  something  is 
more."  The  something  to  which  he  alluded  was 
unquestionably  the  idea,  the  subject  of  the  picture, 
which  to  him  as  to  all  of  us  constitutes  its  real  sig- 

21 


nificance  and  which,  to  borrow  a  phrase  from  the 
idiom  of  the  theatre,  an  artist  must  "get  over,"  or 
make  the  observer  fully  realize,  if  his  work  is  to 
serve  any  useful  purpose  in  the  world.  Whatever 
criticism  may  be  properly  applied  to  his  method  of 
painting,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  he  did  just  that 
and  with  a  manner  comparable  only  to  that  of  a 
great  actor  who  impersonates  characters  upon  the 
stage  with  such  a  semblance  of  life  as  to  stir  us  to 
unaccustomed  manifestations  of  feeling. 

According  to  Fuller's  way  of  thinking,  "color  in 
its  highest  sense  is  a  delicate  sense  of  gradation,"  and 
as  Mr.  Howells  informs  us  in  his  brief  sketch  of  the 
artist's  life,  "He  preferred  to  remove  the  object  of 
interest  in  his  picture  a  degree  into  its  atmosphere, 
believing  that  this  gave  a  greater  chance  for  ex- 
pression," just  as  one  might  say  that  the  stage  pro- 
vides an  atmosphere  for  the  actor  in  whatever  role 
he  may  appear  that  enables  him  to  realize  more 
effectually  its  possibilities.  This  atmosphere  in 
Fuller's  canvases  is  adjusted  always  to  that  degree 
of  definition  he  considered  best  suited  to  bring  out 
the  particular  characteristics  of  the  type  pictured 
without  discovering  the  obvious  and  inessential 
details  of  the  mise  en  scene.  It  is  because  of  this 
that  the  Nydia  is  so  much  more  than  an  imaginary 
portrait  of  Bulwer's  heroine.  She  is  the  personifica- 
tion of  all  the  tragedy  of  the  blind  made  doubly  real 

22 


George  Fuller:   The  Romany  Girl 

Collection  of  Mr.  Henry  Clay  frick,  New  York 


George    Fuller:   Winifred  Dysart 

Museum  of  Art,  Worcester,  Mass. 


George  Fuller:  The  Quadroon 

The  Hearn  Collection,  Metropolitan  Museum  of  Art,  New  TorJz 


George  Fuller:   Psyche 
The  Art  Institute,  Chicago 


and  moving  by  her  youth  and  beauty.  There  is 
nothing  forced  about  the  development  of  the  mean- 
ing of  such  a  calamity  in  the  picture;  rather  is  it 
apparently,  though  not  actually,  modified  by  his 
removal  of  the  figure  a  degree  into  the  atmosphere. 
It  illustrates  very  forcibly,  I  think,  the  logic  of  his 
theory. 

In  The  Romany  Girl  the  characterization  of  the 
type  is  confined  to  a  very  sensitive  interpretation  of 
facial  expression,  and  most  of  all  one  senses  it  in  the 
gypsy  light  within  her  eyes.  Of  the  vivid  scarfs  and 
kerchiefs  we  associate  with  the  wandering  tribes  the 
artist  has  made  no  use  and,  except  for  the  extraordi- 
nary head-dress  and  the  sheaf  of  grain  in  her  hand, 
there  is  nothing  other  than  her  look  to  indicate  who 
or  what  she  is.  How  fine  was  Fuller's  perception  of 
spiritual  as  distinguished  from  physical  evidence  of 
individuality  is  nowhere  more  apparent  than  in  this 
canvas,  where  it  is  relied  upon  entirely  to  acquaint  us 
with  the  character. 

Of  the  Winifred  Dysart  I  should  say  that  it  is 
patently  more  pleasing  in  color,  more  satisfactory  in 
technic,  but  notwithstanding  less  significant  and 
therefore  less  impressive  than  either  of  the  paintings 
mentioned.  It  is,  however,  a  sufficiently  interesting 
picture  to  arrest  one's  attention  anywhere  and  as 
likely  as  not  to  satisfy  one  quite  as  completely  with 
its  exquisite  suggestion  of  the  dreaming  loveliness 

23 


of  maiden  meditation.  The  figure  is  less  mature 
even  than  the  Nydia  and  a  fraction  more  graceful, 
I  should  say;  the  pose  simpler  and  finer,  the  drawing 
as  good,  and  the  idea  perhaps  only  seemingly  less 
perfectly  embodied  in  the  model  because  of  the  less 
dramatic  quality  of  the  conception.  This  girl  is 
lyrical  in  her  loveliness,  the  Nydia  tragic  in  her 
trouble,  and  the  Romany  Girl  romantic  in  her  relation 
to  life  as  we  see  from  her  glance. 

The  most  touching  and  the  most  telling  of  Fuller's 
figure  pictures,  however,  is,  to  my  way  of  thinking. 
The  Quadroon.  Again  it  is  a  girl  he  chooses  to  in- 
terpret his  idea,  and,  young  as  she  is,  he  manages  to 
invest  her  with  the  definite  appearance  of  a  com- 
prehension of  the  sorrows  of  her  inheritance,  over- 
whelming if  unconvincing  to  her  troubled  heart. 
In  her  he  has  contrived  a  graphic  presentation  of  the 
bitter  wrong  mankind  has  worked  upon  man  since 
time  began,  and  has  driven  its  meaning  home  by  the 
look  of  weary  despair  that  clouds  her  childish  face. 
I  know  few  modern  pictures  as  perfect  of  the  kind 
and  they  are  numbered  among  the  supreme  master- 
pieces of  the  art  of  the  nineteenth  century:  works 
like  Whistler's  portrait  of  his  mother  and  Millet's 
Man  with  the  Hoe.  They  are  the  present-day  equiv- 
alents of  such  things  as  Caravaggio's  Homer  and 
Rembrandt's  Saul  listening  to  David  playing  the 
Harp.    A  certain  indescribable  but  no  less  unmis- 

24 


takable  and  miraculous  similitude  of  life  diiferentiates 
them  from  other  canvases  of  their  kind. 

Every  one  of  these  great  works  of  Fuller's  which  I 
have  described  was  painted  long  after  he  had  left 
the  Deerfield  farm  where  somehow  he  had  found 
leisure  to  invent  for  himself  a  style  that  was  emi- 
nently his  own.  The  Romany  Girl,  which  was  the 
first  in  order  of  their  inception,  was  begun  in  1877; 
The  Quadroon  is  of  1880;  the  Winifred  Dysart  fol- 
lowed in  1 88 1  and  the  Nydia  in  1882.  He  also  pro- 
duced immediately  thereafter  five  other  figure  sub- 
jects similar  in  kind  but  not  quite  so  fine,  the  Psyche, 
the  Lorette  and  the  Priscilla  all  in  1882,  the  Arethusa 
in  '83,  and  the  Fidalma  in  '84.  With  these  dates  to 
go  by  it  is  not  difficult  to  determine  his  best  period 
as  beginning  in  1877,  when  he  made  the  first  study 
of  The  Romany  Girl.  Especially  as  we  know  that 
this  date  is  also  that  of  the  finest  of  his  groups.  And 
She  was  a  Witch,  a  painting  now  unfortunately  in  a 
half-ruined  condition  and  in  immediate  need  of 
restoration.  During  his  last  years  his  reaction  to 
the  vicarious  experiences  of  the  creator  of  the  beauti- 
ful, whose  material  is  the  emotional  content  of  life, 
was  less  sure  in  itself,  and  his  power  to  insinuate  in 
the  figures  he  portrayed  anything  like  the  same 
amount  of  feeling  that  is  sensed  in  the  presence  of 
these  figures  is  increasingly  patent.  He  was  able  to 
visualize  his  ideas  and  the  figures  were  expressive, 

25 


but  they  never  move  us  quite  as  those  do  that  were 
painted  just  previously. 

Fuller  once  said  to  an  artist  friend,  "It  is  often 
what  you  leave  out  that  makes  your  picture."  He 
customarily  left  out  a  great  deal,  but  he  also  put  a 
great  deal  in,  and  it  was  as  much  what  he  put  into 
his  pictures  as  what  he  left  out  that  made  them,  if 
I  am  not  mistaken.  Into  his  figures  he  put  reality 
and  as  much  of  individual  emotion  and  of  the  intel- 
lectual attitude  of  specific  types  as  one  will  find  any- 
where in  the  art  of  his  day.  A  power  possessed  by 
some  painters  of  almost  every  period,  but  by  few  of 
any  time  in  such  a  high  degree,  it  ranks  him  with 
the  greatest  of  those  who  have  essayed  the  portrayal 
of  human  character  as  it  is  affected  by  the  dominant 
influences  of  life. 


26 


EARLY  OIL  PAINTINGS 
BY  WINSLOW  HOMER 


WiNSLow  Homer:   Haymaking 
Collection  of  Mr.  Frederic  Fairchild  Sherman,  New  York 


EARLY  OIL  PAINTINGS 
BY  WINSLOW  HOMER 

HOMAS  BAILEY  ALDRICH  in  1866 
wrote  of  Winslow  Homer's  early 
studio  in  the  old  University  building 
in  New  York,  that  "it  is  remarkable 
for  nothing  but  its  contracted  di- 
mensions; it  seems  altogether  too 
small  for  a  man  to  have  a  large  idea  in.'*  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  most  of  Homer's  ideas  then,  as  later,  came 
to  him  elsewhere;  in  soldier  camps,  at  Houghton 
farm,  in  the  North  Woods,  Bermuda  or  Maine. 
Eventually,  however,  the  cramped  life  of  the  city, 
encompassed  by  walled  streets  and  harassed  by  the 
unnatural  noises  of  endless  traffic,  drove  him  to  the 
distant  coast  of  Maine,  where  he  found  a  congenial 
home  and  his  greatest  inspiration  in  a  supreme  in- 
terpretation of  the  grandeur  of  the  sea. 

His  reputation  as  a  marine  painter  has  been  suffi- 
ciently established  by  the  able  exposition  of  other 
critics  and  needs  no  further  emphasis,  but  I  feel  that 
there  is  something  more  of  merit  to  be  found  in  his 
early  oil  paintings  than  others  have  recognized. 
Admitting  their  technical  deficiencies,  which  indeed 
he  really  never  overcame,  the  charm  of  his  farmyard 

29 


and  school-house  pictures  and  the  realism  of  his 
Civil  War  subjects  are  sufficiently  compelling  to 
permit  one  the  belief  that  they  have  been  somewhat 
neglected  or  certainly  overlooked  for  the  more  pre- 
tentious marines  which  he  produced  in  later  years. 
It  would  be  surprising  indeed  if  an  artist  who  was 
capable  as  a  boy  of  eleven  of  producing  such  a  mas- 
terly little  drawing  as  that  of  the  boys  playing  Beetle 
and  Wedge  should  not  achieve  something  of  dis- 
tinction in  his  early  oil  paintings  of  ten  or  fifteen 
years  later.  That  none  of  Homer's  canvases  of  this 
period  are  numbered  among  those  which  justify  the 
preeminence  of  his  position  as  an  American  painter 
is  due  more,  perhaps,  to  the  insistent  dramatic 
quality  of  his  later  product  than  to  any  degree  of 
artistic  superiority  in  it  sufficient  to  account  for  the 
prevailing  neglect  of  the  very  notable  compositions 
of  his  youth. 

If  he  eventually  concluded  that  the  native  farm- 
hand was  an  inartistic  subject,  it  was  not  before  he 
had  painted  one  or  two  pictures  of  him  that  are  fine 
enough  in  themselves  to  hold  their  own,  in  every  sense 
save  that  of  mere  size,  with  some  of  the  more  pre- 
tentious of  his  later  works.  I  myself  find  the  figures 
in  his  early  paintings  not  merely  more  convincing  in 
construcuon  but  more  satisfying  in  their  individ- 
uality, ^hey  may  not  be  so  heroic  in  form,  but 
neither  are  they  so  wooden  in  structure  as  those  that 

30 


WiNSLow  Homer:  The  Song  ok  the  Lark 
The  Hillyer  Art  Gallery,  Smith  College,  Northampton,  Mass. 


^ 


X     ^ 


follow  in  his  great  marines.  They  have  generally 
more  reality  in  their  obvious  relation  to  their  sur- 
roundings than  the  figures  he  uses  to  illustrate  his 
stories  of  the  sea.  Probably  the  very  fact  that  at 
first  he  aimed  at  nothing  more  than  a  truthful  ren- 
dering of  what  he  found  interesting  in  life,  instead 
of  endeavoring  to  produce  instantaneous  records  of 
its  dramatic  moments,  is  sufficient  to  account  for  the 
sense  of  reality  I  find  in  these  earlier  and  miss  in  his 
later  productions.  Circumstance  effectually  pre- 
cluded the  possibility  of  his  ever  posing  his  models 
so  as  actually  to  paint  from  observation  such  pic- 
tures as  The  Life  Line  and  The  Undertow,  and  he 
had  no  sufficient  knowledge  of  the  figure  to  enable 
him  to  visualize,  so  as  to  paint  from  mental  pro- 
jections, the  actual  appearance  of  such  scenes.  Homer 
himself  said  that  when  he  had  selected  a  subject  he 
painted  it  exactly  as  it  appeared,  and  the  sense  in 
which  this  may  have  been  true  is  indicated  very 
clearly,  I  think,  by  the  measure  in  which  he  failed 
in  some  of  his  later  works  to  picture  the  figure  with 
any  sort  of  convincing  approximation  to  that  realism 
in  which  it  generally  appears  in  his  earlier  canvases. 
Certainly  the  fact  that  a  picture  tells  a  story  in 
no  way  prevents  its  being  perhaps  a  great  work  of 
art,  and  in  an  exact  ratio  to  the  importance  of  the 
story  a  picture  tells  it  may  or  may  not  be  a  master- 
piece as  an  artist  succeeds  or  fails  in  his  presentation 

31 


of  whatever  the  subject  may  be.  The  common  criti- 
cism of  Homer  is  that  he  is  an  illustrator,  not  an 
artist;  it  is  based  upon  an  incomplete  knowledge  of 
his  work  and  practically  ignores  the  best  of  it  — 
those  great  marines  that  tell  no  stories  and  that  have 
no  meanings  other  than  those  that  are  inseparably 
associated  with  our  thought  of  the  sea,  its  power  and 
its  immensity.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  was  an  illus- 
trator and  a  very  able  one,  and  furthermore  he  was 
a  great  artist;  he  became  a  great  artist  whenever 
he  gave  up  painting  stories  of  the  sea  to  paint  the 
sea  itself,  as  will  be  evident  enough,  I  believe,  to  any 
one  who  contemplates  such  canvases  as  the  North- 
easter, and  the  Early  Morning  after  a  Storm  at  Sea. 

It  is  worth  while  to  remark  that,  precisely  because 
Homer  painted  a  subject  exactly  as  it  appeared,  his 
pictures  of  the  sea  are  the  greatest  of  our  time,  for 
they  are  above  all  else  masterpieces  of  realism.  His 
early  pictures  also  are  eminently  realistic  and  exact 
in  their  interpretation  of  everyday  life,  and  very 
often  as  void  of  any  literary  meaning  as  the  finest  of 
his  later  works.  They  have  always  a  human  interest, 
however,  associated  with  our  knowledge  of  life, 
which  suffices  to  arrest  and  hold  the  attention,  and 
oftener  than  not  they  are  really  inviting  in  their 
coloring.  The  Haymaking,  1864,  and  Song  of  the 
Lark,  1876  (an  idea  which  he  used  again,  many  years 
afterward,  in  the  large  canvas  at  Milwaukee),  are 

32 


excellent  examples  of  the  finer  sort  of  realism  one 
finds  in  his  farmyard  pictures.  Here  all  is  simplicity 
and  the  figure  has  all  the  accustomed  value  of  its 
actual  importance  in  the  scene  —  no  more,  no  less. 
The  Musical  Amateurs,  formerly  in  the  collection  of 
Mr.  John  H.  Converse  and  now  owned  by  Mr.  De 
Vine,  possesses  somewhat  of  the  Whistlerian  quality 
that  Kenyon  Cox  has  remarked  in  another  early 
Homer,  the  New  England  Country  School.  In- 
deed, a  sketch  for  the  figure  of  the  'Cellist  which  I 
recently  chanced  upon  reminded  one  very  forcibly 
of  another  sketch  of  a  'Cellist,  from  the  brush  of 
Whistler  himself,  formerly  in  the  late  William  M. 
Chase's  collection  and  now  in  that  of  Mr.  Frank 
Vanderlip.  The  Musical  Amateurs  is  dated  ^(fj  and 
is  not  uninteresting  in  color.  The  sincerity  of  the 
study  of  the  two  musicians  is  sufficient  to  convey  a 
definite  idea  of  their  personalities  to  anyone  inter- 
ested enough  in  such  a  subject  to  examine  the  canvas 
with  the  attention  it  deserves.  And  such  an  exami- 
nation will  discover  in  it  also  a  fine  tonality  and  a 
charming  breadth  of  handling  that  was  not  at  all 
common  to  the  genre  painting  of  the  day  in  this 
country. 

In  these  pictures  of  Homer's  the  pose,  whatever  it 
is,  is  natural,  not  theatrical  in  the  sense  that  many  of 
the  figures  in  later  canvases  are  obviously  arranged 
in   difficult   tableaux   to   illustrate   unusual   stories. 

33 


In  doing  just  that  sort  of  thing  he  oftener  than  not 
sacrificed  too  much  of  the  realism,  the  truth,  of  life, 
to  be  very  convincing,  and  to  some  of  us,  at  least,  a 
few  of  his  greatest  canvases  can  therefore  never  be 
anything  other  than  noble  failures. 

In  a  picture  like  The  Bright  Side,  1865,  or  The  Visit 
of  the  Mistress,  1876,  at  the  National  Gallery,  Wash- 
ington, there  is  no  attempt  to  tell  any  story.  But 
the  happy  abandon  of  the  negro  teamsters  in  the 
former  is  as  infectious  as  the  quiet  contentment  of 
the  latter  is  satisfying  to  the  observer.  The  in- 
dividualities of  the  people  pictured  are  preserved  in 
such  a  way  as  to  convey  to  one  an  exact  sense  of  their 
feelings,  and  it  is  because  of  this  that  the  pictures 
appeal  to  us.  They  are  notable  examples  of  his 
ability  to  reproduce  the  sentiment  as  well  as  the 
appearance  of  a  scene,  and  in  their  realism  they 
compare  with  the  best  of  his  work  in  which  the  figure 
appears  at  all. 

Of  landscape  Winslow  Homer  painted  very  little. 
The  two  examples  that  I  reproduce,  one  compara- 
tively early  and  the  other  quite  late,  are  therefore 
of  all  the  more  interest,  simply  as  illustrating  a  very 
uncommon  and  little  known  departure  from  his 
customary  and  familiar  habit.  The  earlier  picture 
is  a  result  of  his  trip  to  France,  and  though  appre- 
ciably tighter  in  treatment  than  the  Prout's  Neck 
sketch,  it  has  all  of  the  out-of-door  feeling  that  so 

34 


fi 

• 

m 

^f 

■^■; ..««»..     .sw-    ^ 

^B 

w. 

J^S: 

^fl| 

i. 

Btc 

f^ 

^Q^K-   ''^ 

fi 

^fr 

'1 

u   a^ 


O 


sensibly  constitutes  the  persuasive  charm  of  the  later 
canvas.  It  is  also  entirely  as  enjoyable  in  color,  and 
from  it  one  gets  definitely  the  feeling  of  locality 
which  is  a  quality  that  differentiates  honest  from 
inferior  landscape  painting.  The  Prout*s  Neck  is 
a  study  so  marked  with  the  conscious  realization  of 
actual  appearances  and  an  adequate  rendering  of 
their  artistic  interest  as  to  persuade  one  that  Homer 
might  well  have  evolved  from  such  an  auspicious 
experiment  a  landscape  as  vital  as  the  most  im- 
pressive of  his  marines.  It  is  instinct  with  the  evi- 
dence of  an  intimate  understanding  of  significant 
form,  finisKed  with  a  rare  economy  of  effort  in  the 
matter  of  mere  painting,  and  not  only  satisfies  the 
most  exacting  expectations  of  the  realist,  but  meas- 
urably fulfils  the  higher  aim  of  pictorial  art  in  its 
suggestive  indication  of  abstract  beauty. 


35 


FIGURE  PICTURES 
BY  WYATT  EATON 


459278 


FIGURE  PICTURES 
BY  WYATT  EATON 

YATT  EATON,  whose  parents  were 
of  New  England  stock,  was  born 
May  6,  1849,  at  Philipsburg,  on 
Missiquoi  Bay,  a  tributary  of  Lake 
Champlain.  As  early  as  his  eight- 
eenth year  he  had  determined  upon 
his  career,  and  going  to  New  York  began  the  study 
of  art  at  the  National  Academy  of  Design  under 
Samuel  Colman,  Daniel  Huntington  and  others, 
working  at  the  same  time  in  the  studio  of  Joseph 
Orion  Eaton,  from  whom  he  also  received  instruction. 
Five  years  later,  in  1872,  he  went  abroad  and  after 
a  short  stay  in  London,  where  he  met  and  received 
some  valuable  suggestions  from  Whistler,  he  pro- 
ceeded to  Paris  and  entered  the  atelier  of  Gerome  at 
the  Beaux-Arts.  The  next  four  years  he  divided 
between  Paris  and  Barbizon,  and  during  this  interval 
was  fortunate  enough  to  become  a  sort  of  protege  of 
Millet's,  who  both  criticized  his  work  and  favored 
him  with  good  advice.  Millet's  influence,  of  course, 
is  evident  in  much  of  Eaton's  painting  of  this  period, 
but  he  was  neither  a  copyist  nor  a  servile  imitator, 
and  very  soon  thereafter  had  developed  a  very  char- 

39 


acteristic  as  well  as  a  very  distinguished  style  of  his 
own.  Shortly  after  his  return  to  this  country  he 
joined  with  Walter  Shirlaw,  Augustus  St.  Gaudens 
and  others  in  the  formation,  in  1877,  of  the  Society 
of  American  Artists,  of  which  he  was  the  first  Sec- 
retary. 

He  was  singularly  gifted,  not  alone  as  a  painter 
but  as  a  critic  and  a  writer.  His  "Notes  on  the 
Early  Italian  Masters,"  "Reminiscences  of  Millet," 
and  "  Recollections  of  American  Poets  "  are  extremely 
interesting  and  suggestive  reading.  He  was  also  as 
much  of  a  master  with  pencil  as  with  brush.  His 
drawings,  of  which  a  considerable  number  have  been 
preserved,  are  accurate  and  illuminating  in  their 
exposition  of  the  persuasive  beauty  of  the  human 
form,  very  sensitive  in  touch  and  very  alluring  in 
line.  He  made  portrait  drawings  from  life  of  Long- 
fellow, Whittier,  Emerson,  Holmes  and  Bryant,  all 
of  which  were  engraved  by  Timothy  Cole  and  pub- 
lished in  the  Century  Magazine,  The  portrait  in  oil 
of  Bryant  which  now  hangs  in  the  Brooklyn  Museum 
is  perhaps  the  finest  thing  of  the  kind  he  produced, 
though  he  painted  many  portraits,  not  a  few  of 
which  probably  would  be  famous  if  known  to  the 
public.  The  Bryant  has  a  solidity  that  is  convincing 
and  a  frankness  that  is  enticing.  The  brush  is 
handled  with  great  skill  but  with  evident  freedom, 
and  a  certain  boldness  that  makes  for  bigness  in  the 

40 


Wyait  Eaton:     Portrait  of  William  Cullen  Bryant 
Museum  of  the  Brooklyn  Institute,  Brooklyn,  N.  T. 


best  sense  characterizes  the  technic  of  the  painting. 
It  is  summary  and  yet  restrained  in  handling,  dig- 
nified and  yet  engaging  as  a  portrait.  Somehow  he 
seems  to  me  to  have  managed  to  incorporate  in  the 
likeness  of  the  man  the  portrait  of  the  poet,  for  the 
picture  always  suggests  the  author  of  the  immortal 
things  like  "Thanatopsis"  which  Bryant  wrote. 

Mrs.  Eaton  in  her  brief  sketch  of  her  husband's  life 
says  that  "one  of  his  most  cherished  desires  was  to 
become  a  painter  of  the  nude,"  and  it  may  be  added 
that  his  later  years  were  pretty  much  devoted  to  the 
effort  to  realize  this  ambition.  His  works  of  the  kind 
are  few,  but  for  purity  and  grace  they  are  hardly  to 
be  excelled  in  American  painting.  Th^  Ariadne  in 
the  Evans  Collection  at  the  National  Gallery  is  to 
my  mind  one  of  our  three  greatest  paintings  of  the 
nude.  Felicitous  and  natural  in  pose,  rich  and  har- 
monious in  color,  sweet  and  pure  in  feeling,  it  in- 
trigues one  with  all  sorts  of  happy  suggestions  of  the 
idyllic  charm,  the  tender  and  exquisite  poetry  of 
youth  dreaming,  as  it  were,  in  the  safety  of  a  paradise 
on  earth.  The  Ariadne  of  John  Vanderlyn  is  more 
famous  because  it  is  better  known,  but  it  is  hardly 
so  fine.  Perhaps  those  who  are  partial  to  the  paint- 
ing of  the  period  think  it  a  finer  work,  but  their 
reason  for  so  doing  can  have  nothing  to  do  with  any 
attribute  of  perfection  save  that  which  finds  expression 
in  the  work  of  Bouguereau.    The  Vanderlyn-Bougue- 

41 


reau  type  of  nude  has  relatively  little  of  the  sug- 
gestion of  life  to  recommend  it,  however  perfect  it  may 
be  in  drawing  and  in  modeling.  In  color  it  tends  to 
sugariness  and  in  line  approaches  the  fixity  of  a 
"cast."  The  fleeting  flushes  of  color  that  give  charm 
to  Eaton's  nudes,  the  suppleness  of  line  that  imbues 
them  with  the  semblance  of  life,  the  earlier  artists 
neither  understood  nor  attempted. 

The  remaining  nude  of  Eaton's  which  I  reproduce 
is,  though  unfinished,  hardly  less  lovely  than  the 
Ariadne.  To  the  painter  and  the  serious  student  of 
painting  it  is  peculiarly  interesting,  entirely  because 
it  is  unfinished,  as  therefore  it  is  possible  to  trace 
through  various  passages  in  it  his  manner  of  paint- 
ing. Formerly  the  property  of  the  late  William  M. 
Chase  and  entitled  Lassitude,  it  is  a  fascinating  study 
of  a  model  resting  against  a  greenish  drapery  in 
slumberous  relaxation,  the  light  falling  full  upon  the 
figure  and  emphasizing  the  graceful  physical  beauty 
of  the  supple  form  and  the  evanescent  pearl  and 
ivory  tones  of  the  nude  flesh.  The  workmanship  is 
wonderful  in  its  suggestion  of  the  painter's  under- 
standing of  the  problem ;  everything  is  finished  in  its 
finality  so  far  as  he  has  gone  with  the  canvas;  and 
because  one  feels  how  surely  it  would  have  eventually 
realized  all  expectations  if  he  had  lived  to  complete 
it,  it  has  somehow  almost  the  distinction  of  a  finished 
work. 

42 


Wyatt  Eaton:     Ariadne 
W.  F.  Etans  Collection,  National  Gallery,  Washington,  D.  C. 


Wyatt  EIaton:    Lassitude 
Collection  of  Mr.  Frederic  Fairchild  Sherman,  New  York 


Wyatt  Eaton:    Reverie 

Collection  of  Mr.  Frederick  B.  Pratt,  Brooklyn,  N.  T. 


The  Reverie  is  a  picture  of  a  more  popular  pattern, 
but  a  very  unusual  and  expressive  one.  Its  chief 
interest  is  as  an  interpretation  of  a  particular  mood, 
though  the  obvious  elegance  of  the  arrangement  or 
design  is  too  apparent  not  to  occasion  remark.  The 
brushwork  is  very  deft,  the  touch  fluent  and  the  color 
gracious  and  reserved,  as  befits  the  subject.  No 
detail  of  dress  or  surroundings  is  sufficiently  devel- 
oped to  divert  one's  attention,  howsoever  slightly  or 
momentarily,  from  the  supreme  interest  of  the  canvas, 
and  yet  the  fabrics  of  the  costume  are  painted  with 
consummate  skill  and  the  reflection  in  the  mirror 
is  well-nigh  a  piece  of  pure  perfection  in  pictorial  art. 

Wyatt  Eaton's  oil  paintings  are  not  common; 
only  three  that  I  know  of  are  in  public  museums  — 
the  Ariadne  at  Washington,  the  Harvesters  at  Rest 
at  the  Hillyer  Art  Gallery,  Northampton,  Mass.,  and 
the  William  CuUen  Bryant  in  Brooklyn.  Several 
others  I  am  familiar  with  are  in  private  collections, 
besides  a  number  of  portraits  in  Canadian  homes. 
His  work  in  oil  is,  I  think,  almost  as  lovely  as  it  is 
rare,  and  any  representative  exhibition  of  it  would,  I 
feel  confident,  result  in  a  belated  realization  of  the 
genuineness  of  his  genius  and  might  rank  him  with  the 
relatively  few  American  masters. 

One  unconsciously  recalls  the  old  saying  about 
"those  whom  the  gods  love  dying  young"  when 
looking  at  the  most  beautiful  of  Wyatt  Eaton's  pic- 

43 


tures,  though,  save  in  the  sense  that  he  did  not  live 
to  be  an  old  man,  he  was  not  really  young  when 
death  overtook  him.  He  died  June  7,  1896,  at  New- 
port, R.  I.,  in  his  forty-eighth  year.  His  works, 
whether  portrait,  figure  composition,  nude  or  land- 
scape, always  have  about  them  an  air  of  classic 
simplicity.  Tricks  of  technic,  beauty  that  is  only 
skin  deep,  either  of  the  human  countenance  or  of  oil 
paint,  design  that  is  dominating  if  not  dignified,  he 
happily  managed  to  do  without.  Nothing,  I  imagine, 
interested  him  so  much  as  the  effort  to  get  at  the 
truth,  whether  it  had  to  do  with  a  reflection  in  a 
mirror,  a  human  likeness,  some  scene  from  nature  or 
an  undraped  figure;  and  the  more  I  study  his 
product  the  more  strongly  I  feel  that  truth  is  not  only 
"stranger  than  fiction"  but  also  more  beautiful. 
He  is  a  consummate  craftsman  who  can  dispense 
with  most  of  the  proverbial  license  that  is  allowed 
the  artist  and  yet  manage  to  produce  a  real  work  of 
art,  and  Wyatt  Eaton  succeeded  at  times  in  doing 
just  that  —  primarily  because  it  was  rather  truth 
of  feeling  than  merely  accuracy  of  representation 
that  he  aimed  at  in  his  canvases. 


44 


ARTHUR   B.  DAVIES 


ARTHUR   B.  DAVIES 


HE  ingenuity  of  Mr.  Davies*  inven- 
tion invests  his  painting  with  unusual 
interest.  His  landscape  presents 
many  original  and  engaging  patterns 
in  which  the  imagination  threads 
secret  pathways  of  delight,  and  his 
figure  pieces  delicately  suggest  in  design  ideas  that 
are  frequently  as  unsubstantial  as  dreams  and  as 
lovely.  The  eclecticism  that  is  evident  in  his  work 
in  no  wise  interferes  with  the  individual  taste  observ- 
able in  its  elaboration  or  the  personal  quality  of  its 
appeal.  Many  of  his  later  canvases  are  attractive 
illustrations  of  moments  of  classic  enchantment  — 
shepherds  piping  to  their  flocks  upon  the  heights  of 
Parnassus,  nymphs  dancing  in  the  Vale  of  Tempe, 
or  maybe  a  group  of  unicorns  gravely  regarding  some 
unfamiliar  vista  of  terrestrial  grandeur.  Keats* 
description  of  the  relief  upon  the  Grecian  Urn  is  the 
immortalization  of  that  significant  beauty  one 
glimpses  in  his  paintings. 

His  earlier  canvases  are  generally  richer  in  color 
than  his  later  works  and  embody  a  more  humble  and 
more  human  and  therefore  more  understandable 
presentation  of  various  manifestations  of  life  illumi- 

47 


nated  with  a  touch  of  recognizable  realism.  Their 
spontaneity  is  too  obvious  to  allow  of  their  escaping 
attention  and  their  rare  simplicity  too  intriguing  to 
permit  of  their  being  neglected  for  the  more  cal- 
culated and  hence  more  compelling  effectiveness  of 
his  subsequent  creations.  In  the  Girl  at  the  Foun- 
tain, which  is  no  more  than  a  mere  sketch,  and  a 
very  early  production,  one  realizes  definitely  the 
sense  of  seeing  a  child  actually  engaged  in  the  per- 
formance of  a  homely  act.  The  intellectual  enjoy- 
ment of  the  picture  is  established  by  the  sincerity 
of  the  study.  It  is  one  of  those  infrequent  examples 
of  a  perfectly  adjusted  sketch  in  which  the  reserve  of 
drawing,  design  and  technic  results  in  a  balance 
of  exquisite  artistic  finish  nicely  calculated  to  just 
that  suggestion  of  the  poetry  of  life  that  colors  a 
drab  experience  with  the  richness  of  romance. 

The  Violin  Girl,  framed  as  a  water-color  in  a  wide 
paper  mat  when  recently  shown,  is  an  early  picture 
very  different  in  execution  and  effect.  A  composi- 
tion as  convincing  in  its  indication  of  actuality  as  the 
earlier  picture  of  the  Girl  at  the  Fountain,  the  figure 
is  drawn  with  extreme  care  and  finished  with  a  degree 
of  precision  that  is  unique  in  his  art.  The  rich 
tonality  of  its  depths  of  sensuous  and  satisfying  color 
achieves  an  effect  possible  only  to  the  medium  as  it 
produces  the  emotional  equivalent  of  music  in  similar 
harmonies   of   sensitive    interpretation.     The   pose, 

48 


restricted  as  it  is  by  the  action,  is  relieved  of  any 
semblance  of  the  commonplace  by  a  conscientious 
elimination  of  all  superfluous  triviality  of  detail,  and 
the  picture  is  made  really  memorable  by  a  subtle 
rendering  of  facial  expression  through  which  a  definite 
realization  of  the  emotion  is  communicated  to  the 
spectator.  The  work  has  something  of  the  sim- 
plicity of  design  and  of  the  elegance  and  refinement 
of  color  that  one  associates  with  Florentine  painting 
of  the  Renaissance,  without  any  suggestion  of  it, 
however,  in  the  more  obvious  and  essential  charac- 
teristics of  technic  or  intention.  Color  more  eloquent 
than  that  in  this  picture  one  seldom  encounters. 

Several  of  Mr.  Davies'  finer  decorative  panels  with 
figures  have  something  of  the  supreme  refinement  of 
the  sculptured  friezes  of  antiquity  and  as  little 
relation  to  actual  life.  They  are  superlatively  at- 
tractive representations  of  the  immortal  beauties  of 
fable  rather  than  of  fact,  and  to  admit  that  they 
continue  to  appeal  to  certain  subconscious  predilec- 
tions for  what  one  may  term  art  for  art's  sake  long 
after  one's  first  enthusiasm  over  them  has  definitely 
passed,  is  to  acknowledge  an  approximation  to 
artistic  perfection  that  becomes  a  patent  and  per- 
manent interest  upon  fuller  acquaintance. 

The  development  of  Mr.  Davies*  technic  is  ap- 
parent in  a  consistent  eff^ort  to  realize  in  his  line  with 
relatively  flat  color  the  utmost  of  pictorial  represen- 

49 


tation.  It  is  a  method  as  difficult  as  it  is  direct 
and  provides  for  little  more  in  the  way  of  alteration 
or  elaboration  than  water  color.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  presents  possibilities  of  realizing  beauties  of  the 
brush  that  are  inevitably  lost  in  the  manipulation  of 
mere  paint.  Working  in  this  way  is  practically  free- 
hand drawing  in  thin  color  with  the  brush  and  one 
must  needs  be  a  consummate  draughtsman  to  at- 
tempt it  with  any  hope  of  success.  In  what  he  has 
now  to  show  there  is  noticeable,  at  times,  a  fluffiness 
or  woolliness  of  pigment  that  veils  the  very  line 
through  which  he  essays  to  establish  the  perfection 
and  the  permanence  of  a  vision  that  informs  his 
pictures  with  unique  and  individual  charm. 

A  very  expert  and  extremely  facile  craftsman,  his 
latest  works  have  more  the  appearance  of  elaborate 
exercises  in  drawing  than  of  anything  that  can  be 
reasonably  described  as  authentic  artistic  creation. 
Without  any  sensible  meaning  and  lacking  sufficient 
vital  significance  to  even  suggest  that  which  they 
lack,  these  pictures  display,  nevertheless,  a  degree 
of  skill  expended  in  fruitless  experiments  in  the  in- 
tricacies of  linear  design  that  might  very  possibly 
suffice  to  express  living  thoughts  in  some  such  way  as 
to  produce  real  masterpieces.  One  is  constantly 
aware,  in  looking  at  them,  of  Mr.  Davies'  prodigious 
delight  in  the  display  of  his  facility,  but  in  so  much 
as  one  looks  for  anything  more  than  fine  drawing, 

SO 


z    ^ 


S   a,- 


>   ^ 

.     s 
m  -2 


color  or  design  in  a  picture  they  ^,re  consistently  dis- 
appointing. If,  indeed,  these  works  have  any  mean- 
ings at  all,  they  are  entirely  lost  in  a  style  of  composi- 
tion at  once  too  involved  for  the  human  understand- 
ing and  too  evidently  egotistic  and  personal  to 
permit  of  any  permanent  intellectual  enjoyment 
even  if  they  were  intelligible.  To  represent  any 
number  of  exquisitely  satisfying  human  figures  so 
muddled  together  in  elaborate  denial  of  the  most 
elementary  requirements  of  grace,  or  so  twisted  and 
tortured  in  unnecessary  and  unnatural  contortions 
as  to  recall  nothing  if  not  man's  animal  ancestry,  is 
hardly  evidence  of  an  impulse  likely  to  add  anything 
of  lasting  importance  to  the  art  of  today.  I  do  not 
know  of  a  single  recognized  masterpiece  in  pictorial 
art  that  does  not  either  express  an  idea  or  convey  a 
suggestion  of  something  other  than  the  mere  ability 
of  the  artist.  It  is  precisely  these  ideas  and  these 
suggestions  that  enliven  with  interest  and  inform 
with  vitality  those  paintings  of  every  school  and  of 
every  master  that  really  achieve  greatness. 


51 


EARLY  GENRE   PICTURES 
BY  HARRY  W.  WATROUS 


EARLY  GENRE   PICTURES 
BY  HARRY  W.  WATROUS 

HERE  are  today  practically  no 
painters  of  the  type  of  genre  picture 
of  cabinet  size  that  Vibert,  Meissonier, 
and  Bargue  made  famous  during  the 
last  century,  though  as  late  as  the 
eighties  there  were  still  a  number  of 
younger  men  studying  in  Paris  who  painted  such 
works.  Harry  Watrous,  who  is  known  today  en- 
tirely as  a  painter  of  a  very  different  kind  of  picture, 
was  one  of  this  little  band.  It  is  to  these  early 
canvases  of  his  that  I  wish  to  call  attention  now  — 
both  on  account  of  their  very  obvious  merits  and 
because  they  constitute  almost  the  only  works  (ex- 
cepting some  by  Louis  Moeller,  Ignaz  Gaugengigl, 
and  Alfred  Kappes)  of  American  production  belong- 
ing to  an  extremely  interesting  and  beautiful  though 
no  longer  popular  type  of  picture. 

The  particular  sort  of  painting  we  are  considering 
is,  of  course,  descended  directly  from  such  seven- 
teenth-century masters  as  Metsu,  Terborch,  and 
Vermeer.  The  modem  artists  consciously  endeav- 
ored to  duplicate  the  same  qualities  that  distinguish 
the  pictures  of  these  Dutch  masters  of  the  great 

55 


period,  while  reproducing  the  life  of  their  own  time. 
The  most  obvious  difference  in  manner  is  perhaps  an 
increased  definition  of  detail  in  the  later  work  and  a 
corresponding  sacrifice  of  that  fine  simplicity  that 
gives  dignity  to  the  most  trifling  subjects  treated  by 
the  great  Dutchmen.  Surfaces  the  nineteenth-cen- 
tury artist  painted  perhaps  as  skilfully  as  they  — 
his  velvets  and  furs,  satins  and  still-life  are  well-nigh 
perfect,  but  the  greater  problems  of  lighting,  which 
the  Dutchmen  definitely  solved  and  in  so  doing 
made  of  their  pictures  real  masterpieces,  the  nine- 
teenth-century painter  never  satisfactorily  solved 
at  all. 

The  vogue  of  these  little  genre  pictures  is  now  so 
entirely  a  thing  of  the  past  that  one  perhaps  over- 
estimates somewhat  their  beauty  and  their  charm. 
Attractive  examples  are  sold  at  auction  every  year 
for  modest  prices  and,  as  none  are  being  produced 
today,  one  cannot  but  feel  that  their  future  is 
assured  and  that  it  will  see  them  reestablished  in 
public  favor  and  eagerly  sought  after  by  the  con- 
noisseur of  the  next  generation. 

The  pictures  of  Mr.  Watrous  in  this  vein  which 
I  shall  mention  were  all  painted  in  the  few  years 
from  1883  to  1888,  when  he  was  a  very  young  man, 
and  show  an  astonishing  ability  in  handling  difficult 
technical  problems  with  real  success.  It  is  not  a 
simple  matter  to  reproduce  with  oil  paint  the  sheen 

S6 


Harky  W.  Watrous:    L' Addition 


Harry  W.  Watrous:  The  Guitar  Player 


of  satins  and  of  silks,  the  softness  of  furs  and  the 
richness  of  velvets,  especially  when  it  comes  to  doing 
it  on  a  small  canvas  with  the  minute  precision 
required  in  a  picture  that  is  intended  to  be  seen  at 
close  range.  Added  to  that  task  also  is  the  further 
and  greater  one  of  an  arrangement  artistic  in  itself 
and  interesting  enough  to  intrigue  the  observer's 
attention ;  the  final  disposition  of  light  and  shadow 
and  such  a  portrayal  of  facial  expression  as  in  the 
small  figures  of  these  cabinet  paintings  finally  deter- 
mine their  meaning  and  therefore  measure  their 
importance  and  success  as  works  of  art. 

The  strain  upon  an  artist's  eyes  in  doing  such 
miniature-like  work  is  very  great  and  in  the  case  of 
Mr.  Watrous  effectually  prevented  his  continuing 
it,  having  seriously  affected  his  sight.  He  has  how- 
ever been  fortunate  enough  to  retain  in  his  possession, 
or  to  acquire  in  later  years,  some  of  the  best  of  the 
canvases  of  this  kind  which  he  painted  in  Paris  long 
ago.  He  undoubtedly  experiences  now  all  of  the 
pleasure  in  living  with  them  that  I  felt  upon  seeing 
them  for  the  first  time  in  his  home  except,  of  course, 
the  surprise  of  discovering  something  beautiful 
unknown  to  one  before. 

In  an  attempt  to  differentiate  them  and  establish 
my  preference  among  them  I  find  that  for  exceptional 
handling  of  the  light  and  shadow  I  incline  to  The 
Guitar   Player,   though   in  details  of  drawing  and 

57 


rendering  of  textures  the  subject  does  not  quite  equal 
the  others.  The  expression  of  the  old  gentleman 
fingering  the  instrument  is  conspicuously  successful 
in  its  portrayal  of  the  intentness  of  the  performer 
upon  the  rendering  of  his  theme  whatever  it  may 
be.  The  left  arm  should  not  be  overlooked  as  an 
evidence  of  the  painter's  skill  in  handling  a  difficult 
pose. 

For  the  picture  called  L'Addltion  the  models  were 
those  of  Meissonier  and  Vibert,  the  former's  the 
seated  figure  and  the  latter's  the  one  standing. 
Mr.  Watrous  tells  with  considerable  glee  of  their 
reminiscences  of  these  great  painters  and  of  their 
quarrels  while  he  was  at  work  upon  this  little  canvas. 
Here  again  the  faces  are  very  expressive,  but  it  will 
be  noted  that  there  is  nothing  of  great  difficulty  or 
superior  distinction  in  the  poses,  and  the  lighting  is 
not  unusual.  The  whole  picture  centres  upon  the 
representation  of  a  commonplace  enough  incident 
and  its  merit  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  is  accomplished 
in  a  way  that  establishes  its  claim  to  consideration 
as  a  work  of  art,  whereas  a  little  less  of  fineness  in 
any  one  of  many  details  and  it  would  sink  to  the  level 
of  a  mere  illustration. 

In  two  other  subjects,  Records,  and  one  entitled, 
Lost,  there  is  an  insistence  upon  the  minutiae  of  this 
kind  of  painting  that  unhappily  magnifies  the  more 
specifically  technical  and  therefore  less  really  im- 

S8 


Harry  W.  Watrous:    Records 


Harry  W.  Watrous:   Lost 


portant  elements  that  enter  into  it.  In  the  former 
particularly  the  edges  are  hard  and  the  light  so  strong 
as  to  reveal  pitilessly  the  otherwise  unimportant 
imperfections  of  the  composition.  The  canvas  called 
Lost  is  chiefly  interesting  for  the  fine  rendering  of  the 
textures  of  the  old  gentleman's  olive-green,  fur- 
trimmed  great-coat,  the  red  waistcoat  showing 
beneath,  and  for  being  exceptionally  happy  in  color 
as  a  whole.  The  gray  sands  of  the  shore  in  the  fore- 
ground, the  pale  gray  and  blue  of  the  water  and  the 
sky,  form  a  most  charming  setting  for  the  figure, 

I  saw  elsewhere  a  year  or  two  ago  another  of  these 
early  cabinet  paintings  by  Mr.  Watrous  which  I 
should  like  to  be  able  to  write  about  more  fully  than 
is  possible  out  of  a  dimmed  recollection  of  its  actual 
appearance.  It  was  called  Mending  the  Fishing  Rod 
and  represented  a  middle-aged  man  seated  on  a  low 
bench  or  stool,  his  legs  spread  wide  and  across  his 
lap  a  fish-pole,  over  which  he  is  bent  at  work,  winding 
it  with  silk  perhaps  or  fixing  a  guide  ring  for  his  line. 
A  homely  subject,  it  was  treated  with  sincerity,  and 
impressed  me  at  the  time  as  being  a  particularly 
successful  performance. 

In  conclusion  I  must  mention  a  very  small  oil 
painting,  a  portrait  of  his  mother  as  an  old  lady,  on 
a  panel  approximately  three  by  five  inches  or  so. 
It  is  one  of  the  best  pieces  of  portraiture  "in  little" 
that  I  know  of  in  American  art.     I  do  not  recall 

59 


another  that  reproduces  so  accurately  such  an 
indication  of  old  age  as  the  pink  of  the  little  veins 
just  under  the  transparent  flesh  of  a  face  or,  from 
a  more  comprehensive  view,  a  more  definite  im- 
pression of  a  very  real  and  lovable  personality. 


60 


BENJAMIN  WEST 


BENJAMIN  WEST 


ERHAPS  the  unanimity  with  which 
the  greatest  of  English  painters  re- 
sponded toward  the  end  of  the  eight- 
eenth century  to  the  scheme  of  John 
Boydell  for  forming  a  Shakespeare 
Gallery  illustrates  most  forcibly  the 
prevailing  estimate  of  historic  composition  as  the 
highest  achievement  in  the  realm  of  painting.  Sir 
Joshua  contributed  a  design  for  Macbeth,  Romney 
one  for  The  Tempest  and  both  Benjamin  West  and 
Copley  were  represented.  Romney  as  we  now  know 
always  cherished  the  ambition  of  devoting  all  of  his 
abilities  to  works  of  this  description  and  writing  to  his 
friend  Hayley  in  1787  about  the  Shakespearean 
enterprise,  he  says:  "This  cursed  portrait-painting! 
How  I  am  shackled  by  it!"  George  Paston,  in  his 
late  "Life"  of  the  artist,  remarks  very  pertinently 
that  "Connoisseurs  are  inclined  to  give  thanks  that 
his  love  of  depicting  pretty  faces  and  his  desire  to 
realize  a  competence  interfered  with  his  ambitious 
schemes." 

Benjamin  West,  who,  upon  his  arrival  in  England 
in  1763,  became  almost  at  once  a  personality  of 
consequence  in  art  circles  there,  included  among  the 

63 


canvases  he  sent  to  the  Spring  Gardens  Exhibition 
of  the  year  following  a  single  portrait.  He  had,  it 
seems,  even  then  practically  given  up  work  in  that 
particular  field  in  which  he  had  earned  in  his  native 
land  his  first  modest  success,  and  it  was  not  long 
thereafter  that,  as  his  first  biographer,  John  Gait, 
records,  "a  series  of  circumstances  placed  him  in 
that  precise  station  in  society  where  at  the  time 
there  was  the  only  chance  of  profitable  employment 
as  an  historical  painter."  The  reference,  of  course, 
is  to  West's  favor  with  the  King,  for  whom  he  painted 
almost  exclusively  during  the  period  from  1768  to 
1 78 1  inclusive,  producing  a  series  of  large  religious 
and  historical  compositions  for  which,  including 
several  portraits  and  groups  of  the  royal  family, 
he  received  a  total  of  over  forty  thousand  pounds. 
While  it  is  true  that  he  is  responsible  for  the  substi- 
tution of  realism  in  the  historical  painting  of  the 
time  which  was  stultified  by  an  absurd  but  generally 
approved  fashion  of  representing  figures  always 
in  the  classic  costume  of  antiquity,  it  is  his  mis- 
fortune to  have  been  possessed  by  a  passion  for 
grandiose  subjects  and  pictures  of  almost  impossible 
dimensions. 

As  a  youth  in  Philadelphia  and  New  York,  West 
began  by  painting  portraits  exclusively,  and  if  the 
few  he  did  in  after  years  are  any  criterion  of  his  early 
abilities  he  must  have  started  out  with  a  remarkable 

64 


Benjamin  West:   John  Sedley 
Collection  of  Mr.  Walter  Jennings,  New  York 


aptitude  for  incorporating  in  his  likenesses  just  those 
elusive  indications  of  personality  that  are  common 
to  all  that  is  notably  true  and  fine  in  portraiture. 
It  would  not  be  possible  to  maintain  that  he  was 
ever  a  great  portrait-painter  in  the  sense  that  several 
of  his  contemporaries  unquestionably  were,  but  it  is 
quite  evident  that  in  the  realm  of  male  portraiture 
at  least  he  was  the  equal  of  some  of  them. 

One  of  the  gratifying  results  of  the  present  revival 
of  interest  in  the  early  American  portrait-painters 
is  the  fact  that  it  has  brought  to  our  shores  a  number 
of  excellent  examples  by  West,  acquainting  us  with 
that  phase  of  his  art  which  he  almost  entirely  neg- 
lected at  the  height  of  his  powers  and  during  the 
period  of  his  unprecedented  popularity.  Their  suav- 
ity as  well  as  their  sincerity,  their  fine  color  as  well 
as  their  technical  excellence,  inevitably  persuade  one 
that  this  was  his  proper  field  of  artistic  expression, 
and  that  the  circumstances  which  permitted  him  to 
devote  the  best  part  of  his  life  to  the  execution  of 
elaborate  tableaux  that  today  are  but  little  more 
than  a  memory  in  the  minds  of  men,  deprived  his 
time  and  our  own,  as  well  as  posterity,  of  any  number 
of  really  fine  portraits  of  men,  for  he  was  an  inde- 
fatigable worker  and  consequently  a  prolific  painter. 

The  John  Sedley  in  the  collection  of  Mr.  Walter 
Jennings  and  another  male  portrait  recently  acquired 
by  the  Chicago  Art  Institute  are  fortunately  both 

6s 


late  works,  the  former  being  dated  1802  and  the 
latter  1792.  They  belong  to  the  Hmited  series  of 
commissions  undertaken  toward  the  end  of  his  Hfe- 
time,  but  before  his  eye  began  to  fail  or  his  hand  to 
falter  and  are  excellent  interpretations  of  character 
and  convincing  pieces  of  portraiture.  The  modelling 
of  the  features  and  the  sensitive  emphasis  of  indi- 
vidual expression  in  the  faces  are  happily  evident  in 
the  reproductions.  No  better  illustrations  of  the 
artist's  accomplishment  in  the  way  of  portraiture 
are  likely  to  be  found.  That  he  was  content  to 
adhere  to  established  procedure  in  the  posing  of 
his  sitters  is  of  no  particular  consequence  inasmuch 
as  they  are  invariably  represented  in  natural  and 
dignified  attitudes  that  never  detract  from  the  illu- 
sion of  life.  In  the  Brook  Club  in  New  York  hangs 
his  portrait  group  of  Ralph  Izard  and  his  Friends, 
It  is  an  attractive  composition  and  a  distinguished 
technical  performance  as  well  as  being  an  interesting 
interpretation  of  nicely,  differentiated  presentments 
of  personality.  West  wisely  eschewed  in  his  por- 
traiture any  approach  to  that  approximation  of  the 
dramatic  in  arrangement  that  is  so  considerable  a 
factor  in  his  historical  and  religious  canvases,  and 
specialized  altogether  upon  the  portrayal  of  per- 
sonality as  it  is  to  be  observed  in  the  human  counte- 
nance, translated  by  a  momentary  glance  or  a  passing 
expression  into  an  intelligible  definition  of  character. 

66 


Benjamin  West:    Portrait  of  a  Gentleman 
The  Art  Institute,  Chicago,  III. 


Such  of  West's  subject  pictures  as  have  recently- 
been  added  to  American  collections  are  naturally 
those  of  modest  size,  a  matter  that  we  need  not 
regret  as  they  are  finer  examples  than  many  of  the 
more  pretentious  works.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to 
say  that  the  purity  of  his  color  and  the  excellence  of 
his  technic  are  just  as  apparent  in  them  as  in  his 
portraits.  The  Envoys  Returning  from  the  Prom- 
ised Land,  in  the  Hackley  Art  Gallery,  illustrates  his 
capabilities  and  his  limitations  in  this  field.  The 
forcibly  and  finely  drawn  figure  of  the  warrior  with 
the  drawn  sword  at  the  right  of  the  canvas  alone 
meets  the  dramatic  requirements  of  the  scene.  The 
others  hardly  emerge  from  the  customary  obscurity 
of  the  commonplace  and  even  so  only  as  the  artist 
succeeds  in  investing  one  or  another  with  some 
special  charm  of  color  or  of  pose.  The  women  are 
noticeably  oblivious  in  their  pretty  way  of  what  is 
transpiring  and  the  action  and  expression  of  even 
the  more  prominent  of  the  remaining  actors  in  the 
scene  are  quite  unmistakably  assumed  and  per- 
functory. The  resemblance  of  the  warrior  to  a 
type  familiar  in  Italian  painting  of  the  Renais- 
sance, of  the  women  to  the  prevailing  type  in 
eighteenth-century  English  art  and  of  the  Patri- 
arch to  a  type  common  enough  in  Rembrandt's 
work,  proves  that  West  was  very  much  of  an 
eclectic  and  unhesitatingly  adopted  in  his  practice 


whatever  of  merit  he  found  in  the  art  of  other  men 
and  other  days. 

In  another  historical  composition,  the  Presenta- 
tion of  the  Queen  of  Sheba  at  the  Court  of  King 
Solomon,  now  at  the  Worcester  Museum,  the  sug- 
gestion of  Rembrandt  occurs  again  in  the  turbaned 
figure  at  the  right  of  the  King,  as  well  as  more  forcibly 
in  whole  general  arrangement,  grouping  and  lighting, 
of  the  canvas.  The  face  of  that  one  of  the  Queen's 
attendants  facing  the  spectator  and  standing  at  the 
centre  of  those  behind  her,  except  for  a  certain  soft- 
ness and  sweetness,  somehow  reminds  one  of  the 
great  Spaniard,  Goya.  The  composition  has  an 
undeniable  heroic  quality  and  the  lighting  is  notably 
effective.  It  would  be  an  almost  wholly  satisfactory 
rendering  of  the  subject  did  not  the  impressiveness 
of  the  moment  suffer  somewhat  of  an  eclipse  through 
the  simpering  fatuity  of  the  various  females.  It  is 
curious,  by  the  way,  that  West,  having  introduced 
the  style  of  painting  personages  of  his  own  and 
immediately  preceding  ages  in  their  proper  costume 
should  have  persisted  in  the  use  of  the  costume  of 
his  own  day  in  picturing  scenes  from  antiquity. 
The  women  in  this  canvas  and  in  the  Hackley  Art 
Gallery  picture  are  dressed  in  the  mode  of  eighteenth- 
century  England  and  thereby  quite  effectually  pre- 
vent their  perfectly  realizing  the  effects  intended. 
That  they  are  not  impressive  in  any  such  sense  as 

68 


^  ^ 


p< 


o 


o    ^ 


w 


CQ 


Benjamin  West:   Presentation  of  the  Queen  of  Sheba  at  the 

Court  of  King  Solomon 

Museum  of  Art,  Worcester,  Mass. 


they  were  intended  is  the  conclusion  that  is  forced 
upon  one.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  none  of 
the  great  artists  of  his  time  were  any  more  successful 
in  their  efforts  in  this  direction,  and  so  far,  at  least, 
it  is  true  that  the  preeminence  of  his  position  as  a 
painter  of  such  subjects  was  entirely  justified  by  his 
performance  which,  though  it  is  never  entirely  con- 
vincing, is  yet  very  often  punctuated  by  passages  of 
real  and  definite  distinction.  Too  much  of  the 
passion,  the  lust,  the  pathos  of  life,  which  never 
entered  into  the  artist's  experience,  and  which,  never 
understanding,  he  was  unable  to  picture,  is  missing 
for  these  canvases  to  sensibly  stir  us  to  any  great 
enthusiasm.  Lacking  sufficiently  dominant  and  com- 
pelling facial  expressiveness  to  emphasize  or  explain 
their  actions,  his  figures  fail  to  properly  sustain  the 
dramatic  possibilities  of  the  scenes  in  which  they 
appear.  A  great  actor  must  perforce  be  a  master 
of  action  and  of  both  vocal  and  facial  expression. 
In  painting  there  being  no  possibility  of  representa- 
tion of  vocal  expression  the  artist  is  forced  into  the 
necessity  of  realizing  all  of  the  possibilities  of  dra- 
matic interpretation  by  such  a  delineation  of  bodily 
action  and  facial  expression  as  will  create  a  really 
significant  and  unforgettable  picture  of  the  humor, 
the  pathos,  or  the  tragedy  of  life.  Only  the  greatest 
painters  have  ever  succeeded  in  doing  this. 

69 


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